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Select one of the two question sets and respond in about two paragraphs. Provide at least one passage from each of the readings to support your response:

1. According to Jeff Guo and Kat Chow, how did the idea of Asian Americans as the “model minority” emerge? What role did Asian Americans play in the creation of the term? What role did the government and media play in the creation of the term?

2. According to Guo and Chow, what was the original purpose of the idea of the MM (model minority)? What were the unintended consequences of the MM? Based on the intentional purposes and the unintentional consequences, how would you evaluate the MM (model minority)?

1/16/2019 The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans – The Washington Post

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The Washington Post

Economic Policy

The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian
Americans

By Jeff Guo

November 29, 2016

Between 1940 and 1970, something remarkable happened to Asian Americans. Not only did they surpass
African Americans in average household earnings, but they also closed the wage gap with whites.

Many people credit this upward mobility to investments in education. But according to a recent study by Brown
University economist Nathaniel Hilger, schooling rates among Asian Americans didn’t change all that
significantly during those three decades. Instead, Hilger’s research suggests that Asian Americans started to
earn more because their fellow Americans became less racist toward them.

[The real secret to Asian American success was not education]

How did that happen? About the same time that Asian Americans were climbing the socioeconomic ladder,
they also experienced a major shift in their public image. At the outset of the 20th century, Asian Americans
had often been portrayed as threatening, exotic and degenerate. But by the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of the
model minority had begun to take root. Newspapers often glorified Asian Americans as industrious, law-
abiding citizens who kept their heads down and never complained.

Some people think that racism toward Asians diminished because Asians “proved themselves” through their
actions. But that is only a sliver of the truth. Then, as now, the stories of successful Asians were elevated, while
the stories of less successful Asians were diminished. As historian Ellen Wu explains in her book, “The Color of
Success,” the model minority stereotype has a fascinating origin story, one that’s tangled up in geopolitics, the
Cold War and the civil rights movement.

To combat racism, minorities in the United States have often attempted to portray themselves as upstanding
citizens capable of assimilating into mainstream culture. Asian Americans were no different, Wu writes. Some,
like the Chinese, sought respectability by promoting stories about their obedient children and their traditional
family values. The Japanese pointed to their wartime service as proof of their shared Americanness.

African Americans in the 1940s made very similar appeals. But in the postwar moment, Wu argues, it was only
convenient for political leaders to hear the Asian voices.

The model minority narrative may have started with Asian Americans, but it was quickly co-opted by white
politicians who saw it as a tool to win allies in the Cold War. Discrimination was not a good look on the
international stage. Embracing Asian Americans “provided a powerful means for the United States to proclaim

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/jeff-guo/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/19/the-real-secret-to-asian-american-success-was-not-education/

https://jacl.org/asian-american-history/

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~hist32/Hist33/US%20News%20&%20World%20Report

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10134.html

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/10/22/450821244/where-does-the-pull-up-your-pants-school-of-black-politics-come-from

https://www.nps.gov/wwii/learn/historyculture/japanese-americans-at-war.htm

1/16/2019 The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans – The Washington Post

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itself a racial democracy and thereby credentialed to assume the leadership of the free world,” Wu writes.
Stories about Asian American success were turned into propaganda.

By the 1960s, anxieties about the civil right movement caused white Americans to further invest in positive
portrayals of Asian Americans. The image of the hard-working Asian became an extremely convenient way to
deny the demands of African Americans. As Wu describes in her book, both liberal and conservative politicians
pumped up the image of Asian Americans as a way to shift the blame for black poverty. If Asians could find
success within the system, politicians asked, why couldn’t African Americans?

“The insinuation was that hard work along with unwavering faith in the government and liberal democracy as
opposed to political protest were the keys to overcoming racial barriers as well as achieving full citizenship,”
she writes.

Recently, Wu and I chatted on the phone about her book and the model minority stereotype — how it was equal
parts truth, propaganda and self-enforcing prophecy.

Can you tell us a little bit about the question that got you started on this book?

WU: America in general has had very limited ways of thinking about Asian Americans. There are very few ways
in which we exist in the popular imagination. In the mid- to late-19th century, all the way through the late
1940s and 1950s, Asians were thought of as “brown hordes” or as the “yellow peril.” There was the sinister,
weird, “Fu Manchu” stereotype.

Yet, by the middle of the 1960s, Asian Americans had undergone this really arresting racial makeover. Political
leaders, journalists, social scientists — all these people in the public eye — seemed to suddenly be praising
Asian Americans as so-called model minorities.

I thought that might be a very interesting question to try to unravel.

How did these earliest stereotypes — these very negative, nasty images — take root?

Asian Americans first started coming in significant numbers during the California Gold Rush. Chinese
immigrants came to do mining, then they ended up working on the Transcontinental Railroad, and agriculture.
When those jobs died down, a lot of them moved to the cities where they started working in manufacturing.

At that time, in the 1870s, the economy wasn’t doing that well in California. White American workers were very
anxious about keeping their jobs. They looked around and they saw these newcomers who seemed very
different from them.

There already had been a long tradition in the Western world of portraying the “Orient” as unknowable and
mysterious. American workers started attaching these ideas to the Chinese newcomers, who were an easy target
for white American anxieties about the growth of industrial capitalism and the undermining of workers’

1/16/2019 The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans – The Washington Post

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autonomy and freedom. They believed that the Chinese threatened American independence and threatened
American freedom.

These ideas were particularly popular among the white working class at the time. The momentum started to
build in the American West. There was the Workingmen’s Party in California — one of their platforms was “The
Chinese must go.” That’s how they rallied people. And they were very successful at it.

By 1882, Congress passed the first of a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts, which was the first time a race- and
class-based group — Chinese workers — were singled out by American immigration law. The Chinese Exclusion
Acts restricted their entry into the United States and said they couldn’t become naturalized citizens.

What’s really striking is that in the 1890s, the federal government even mandated a Chinese registry. That
sounds a lot like this issue of the Muslim registry today, right?

A lot of what you’re describing sounds familiar today — the economic anxiety bleeding into
racial anxiety, the targeting of outsiders …

Absolutely. There are a lot of resonances. What’s happening today didn’t spring out of nowhere — it has a very
long history in the United States.

Can you describe some of these old stereotypes? I think that most people have some idea from
old Hollywood movies, but it’s just such a contrast to how Asians Americans are portrayed
today.

The ways in which Americans thought about these “Orientals” hinged a lot on moral differences and on issues
of gender, sexuality and family.

Many great historians and scholars have done work on this. The major groups that came before World War II
were the Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, Koreans and Filipinos. There were both similarities and differences
in how the groups were viewed, but generally they were thought to be threatening — significantly different in a
negative sense.

For the most part, a lot of Asian immigrants weren’t Christian, so that was suspect. American Chinatowns had a
thriving vice economy, so gambling, prostitution and drugs became popularly associated with Asians. (Of
course, some of the same white Americans who were criticizing Asians were also the ones participating in these
activities.)

There was this idea of moral depravity. At the time, the Chinese and Filipinos and South Asians in America
were mostly single, able-bodied young men, so that also raised a lot of eyebrows. It looked like they were
sexually wayward.

If you look at old stereotypical imagery of Asians in political cartoons, the way they tend to be depicted is that
they are not aligned with white, middle-class notions of respectable masculinity. There’s the long hair, the

1/16/2019 The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans – The Washington Post

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flowing clothing that didn’t quite look masculine yet didn’t quite look feminine — or maybe it was something
in-between, as some scholars have argued.

The women were also thought of as morally suspect — as prostitutes, sexually promiscuous, that kind of thing.

An important argument in your book is that Asians were complicit in the creation of the model
minority myth. The way we talk about this issue today, it’s as if the white majority imposed this
stereotype on Asian communities — but your research shows that’s not the case. How did it
really get started?

Absolutely. That is a critical point to understand. The model minority myth as we see it today was mainly an
unintended outcome of earlier attempts by Asians Americans to be accepted and recognized as human beings.
They wanted to be seen as American people who were worthy of respect and dignity.

At lot was at stake. At the time, Asians were living life under an exclusion regime that had many similarities to
Jim Crow — not the same as Jim Crow, but certainly a cousin of Jim Crow. There was a whole matrix of laws
and discriminatory practices.

By 1924, all immigration from Asia had been completely banned. Asians were considered under the law “aliens
ineligible for citizenship.” There were all these racial restrictions to citizenship under the law — and the last of
these didn’t fall until 1952.

Asian Americans tended to be restricted to segregated neighborhoods, segregated schools. They often did not
have the kind of job prospects that white people had. They would be barred from certain kinds of employment
either by law or by custom.

In 1937, a young U.S.-born Japanese-American man lamented that even if you went to college, you could only
end up being a “professional carrot-washer.” That was really true for a lot of people. They had very limited
options for social mobility. And of course there was also violence — lynchings.

So for Asian Americans, one survival strategy was to portray themselves as “good Americans.”

As you argue in your book, it became increasingly expedient for mainstream Americans to
acknowledge, and even amplify, Asian attempts to gain respectability. What changed?

Those claims really start to stick in the 1940s, when the nation was gearing up for global war. American leaders
started to worry about the consequences of their domestic racial discrimination policies. They were concerned
it would get in the way of forging alliances with other people abroad. That really motivated American leaders
and the American people to work on race relations.

During World War II, lawmakers thought that Chinese exclusion made for bad diplomacy. So Congress decided
to overturn Chinese exclusion as a goodwill gesture to China, who was America’s Pacific ally.

1/16/2019 The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans – The Washington Post

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With the beginning of the Cold War, American policymakers became really attentive to putting their best image
out into the world. They were very interested in winning hearts and minds in Asia.

Japan is a very good example. Japan lost the war and the United States took charge of reconstructing Japan in
its own image as a rising democratic, capitalist country. And because Japan became such an important ally,
that was the moment when Japanese exclusion laws could finally be overturned, which happened in 1952.

Again, people in Congress worried that if we left these laws on the books, it would endanger a billion hearts and
minds in the Far East.

It wasn’t just a geopolitical thing right? It seems that by the 1960s, there were other reasons for
investing in this image of Asians as upstanding citizens, reasons that were closer to home.

Oh, absolutely. There were definitely domestic reasons for why the idea was appealing that Asians could be
considered good American citizens capable of assimilating into American life.

In the 1950s, there were general concerns about maintaining the right kind of home life. There’s this image of
the perfect American family — a suburban household with a mom, a dad, two to three kids, a white picket
fence. That was the ideal, but it wasn’t always realized. There was a juvenile delinquency panic in the 1950s, a
big scare over how the nation’s youth were getting themselves into trouble.

The Chinatown leaders were really smart. They started to peddle stories about Chinese traditional family values
and Confucian ethics. They claimed that Chinese children always listened to their elders, were unquestioningly
obedient and never got into trouble because after school they would just go to Chinese school.

When I started digging, I found that this idea of this model Chinese family, with the perfect children who
always just loved to study and who don’t have time to get into trouble or date — started to circulate quite
prominently in the 1950s. That speaks to America’s anxieties about juvenile delinquency.

Also, since these stories were taking place in Chinatowns, it allowed Americans to claim that America had these
remaining repositories of traditional Chinese values at a time when the Communist Chinese had completely
dismantled them. So there’s this other level where these stories are also anti-Communist — they are doing this
other ideological work.

How true were these stories though? How much of this was racial propaganda, and how much
of it was rooted in reality?

These are obviously very strategic stories. In 1956, the federal government started to crack down on illegal
Chinese immigration, which was in part motivated by the Cold War. So partly, the conservative Chinatown
leaders thought this model Chinese family story would do a lot to protect them. They thought this PR campaign
would reorient the conversation away from “Communists are sneaking into our country” to “Hey, look at these
squeaky-clean, well-behaved children.”

1/16/2019 The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans – The Washington Post

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From reading community newspapers in these Chinatowns, we know they also had a lot of concerns about
juvenile delinquency. In fact, behind closed doors there were heated disagreements about what to do. One
woman in particular — Rose Hum Lee, a sociologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago — wrote lots of
books and papers about the problems in Chinatown, and accused leaders of sweeping these problems under the
rug.

There were Asian Americans then, as today, at the end of the socioeconomic spectrum. And that segment of the
population tends to go unnoticed in these kinds of narratives.

It’s interesting to compare the efforts of the Chinatown leaders to the parallel efforts of leaders
in the African American civil rights movement, who also emphasized respectability — who wore
their Sunday best on these marches where they were hosed down and attacked by dogs. What’s
stunning to me is the contrast. One group’s story is amplified, and the other’s is, well, almost
denied.

I think the Japanese American experience also highlights some of this contrast. At the same time in the 1950s,
you hear these stories about how the Japanese Americans dramatically recovered from the internment camps,
how they accepted their fate. “After internment, many families were scattered across the country, but they took
it as an opportunity to assimilate,” that sort of thing.

Japanese Americans aren’t perceived to be doing any kind of direct action, they weren’t perceived to be
protesting. A bad thing happened to them, and they moved on, and they were doing okay.

These stories were ideologically useful. They became a model for political cooperation. The ideas solidify in the
1950s. Americans had recast Asians into these citizens capable of assimilating — even if they still saw Asians as
somewhat different from whites. And by the 1960s, what becomes important is that these socially mobile,
assimilating, politically nonthreatening people were also decidedly not black.

That’s really the key to all this. The work of the African American freedom movements had made white liberals
and white conservatives very uncomfortable. Liberals were questioning whether integration could solve some
the deeper problems of economic inequality. And by the late 1960s, conservatives were calling for increased law
and order.

Across the political spectrum, people looked to Asian Americans — in this case, Japanese and Chinese
Americans — as an example of a solution, as a template for other minority groups to follow: “Look how they
ended up! They’re doing just fine. And they did it all without political protests.”

That isn’t really true, by the way. Asian Americans did get political, but sometimes their efforts didn’t get seen
or recognized.

These stereotypes about Asian Americans being patriotic, having an orderly family, not having delinquency or
crime — they became seen as the opposite of what “blackness” represented to many Americans at the time.

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I would say it also costs the majority less to allow Asian Americans, who were still a very small
part of the population, to let them play out this saga of upward mobility, rather than
recognizing the rights and claims of African Americans during that same time.

I’m not saying somebody sat down and did a cost-benefit analysis. But in some ways, there seemed to be a big
payoff for little risk. Even with the overturning of the exclusion laws, it’s not like large numbers of Asians were
coming into the United States at the time. Asian Americans at that time were still a pretty marginal part of the
population.

As harmful as Asian exclusion was, I would agree that those structures were not as deep or pervasive as anti-
black racism. It wouldn’t do as much to change the overall social picture by allowing these small numbers of
Asian Americans to move forward. It was easier to do, in some ways, because those exclusion structures were
not as pervasive, and the consequences had not been as long-lasting as they had been for African Americans.

A really fascinating part of your book describes how these new Asian stereotypes shaped the
Moynihan Report, which infamously blamed the plight of African Americans on “ghetto
culture.” I think that is a great example of how this model minority stereotype started to get
used against others in the 1960s.

Daniel Moynihan, the author of that report, was a liberal trying to figure out how to solve this huge problem —
the status of African Americans in American life.

If you look in the report, there’s not really any mention of Asian Americans. But just a few months before the
Moynihan Report came out in the summer of 1965, Moynihan was at a gathering with all these intellectuals and
policymakers. They’re talking about how Japanese and Chinese Americans were “rather astonishing” because
they had thrown off this racial stigma. Moynihan points out that 25 years ago, Asians had been “colored.” Then
Moynihan says, “Am I wrong that they have ceased to be colored?”

That was a very striking and powerful moment to me.

I think a lot of people believe that the model minority stereotype came out of the huge surge of
highly educated Asians who started coming to the United States after 1965. But as your book
shows, I think, the causality actually runs the other way.

It’s mutually reinforcing. At the time that the United States did this major immigration law overhaul in 1965,
policymakers decided that the nation should select its immigrants based on how they could contribute to the
economy (and also to reunify families). So what we start to see is people coming to the United States with these
credentials and backgrounds and training, and they seem to confirm some of the ideas that are already there —
that Asian Americans are model minorities.

My book stops in the late 1960s, but what I think has happened since then is that the model minority
stereotype story has really shifted away from the original ideas of patriotism and anti-communism. We now

1/16/2019 The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans – The Washington Post

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fixate more on education. There’s the image of the tiger mom focused on getting her kid into Harvard. That
emphasis also speaks to a shift in the American economy, how upward mobility really depends on having a
certain kind of educational training.

And the anxieties about Asians have never really gone away. Now they’re portrayed as our global competitors.
So underlying the praise there’s also this fear.

Sometimes in America, it feels like there are only so many racial buckets that people can fall
into. With increased immigration from South Asia and Southeast Asia, for instance, it seemed
like lot of the newcomers were swept up into this model minority narrative.

What happened in 1965 is that we opened up the gates to large-scale immigration from places like Latin
America, the Caribbean and Asia. From Asia, you get large numbers of people coming from South Asia, the
Philippines, Korea. Then by the 1970s, the United States is fighting a war in Southeast Asia, so you get this
refugee migrant stream. And you’re right, they’re stepping into this predetermined racial landscape, these
preconceived notions about how Asians are.

But as a historian, as someone who thinks about race in American life for a living, I also think that the “model
minority” category has only a limited usefulness now in terms of our analysis. We talk about it as a common
stereotype, but it doesn’t explain the whole scope of Asian American life today — especially since 9/11, when
you have communities of South Asians who are Muslims or Sikhs now being racially targeted or labeled as
terrorists. So that has become another stereotype of Asians these days.

I think that underscores maybe the metanarrative of your book — how we in America have
always viewed ethnic and racial minorities through the lens of politics and geopolitics, right? In
terms of international relations, in terms of what kind of image we want to project to the world,
and in terms of what our national anxieties about other countries are.

Absolutely, that’s the link. The model minority stereotype and the terrorist stereotype are related, I agree, in
how they speak to the geopolitical anxieties of their times.

 1605 Comments

Jeff Guo
Jeff Guo was a reporter covering economics, domestic policy and everything empirical. He left The Washington Post in April
2017.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/jeff-guo/

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‘Model Minority’ Myth Again Used As A Racial
Wedge Between Asians And Blacks
April 19, 2017 · 8:32 AM ET

KAT CHOW

The perception of universal success among Asian-Americans is being wielded to downplay racism’s role in the persistent
struggles of other minority groups, especially black Americans.
Chelsea Beck/NP R

A piece from New York Magazine’s Andrew Sullivan over the weekend ended with an
old, well-worn trope: Asian-Americans, with their “solid two-parent family structures,”
are a shining example of how to overcome discrimination. An essay that began by

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imagining why Democrats feel sorry for Hillary Clinton — and then detoured to
President Trump’s policies — drifted to this troubling ending:

“Today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and
successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they
maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after
one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby
turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that
all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?”

Sullivan’s piece, rife with generalizations about a group as vastly diverse as Asian-
Americans, rightfully raised hackles. Not only inaccurate, his piece spreads the idea
that Asian-Americans as a group are monolithic, even though parsing data by ethnicity
reveals a host of disparities; for example, Bhutanese-Americans have far higher rates
of poverty than other Asian populations, like Japanese-Americans. And at the root of
Sullivan’s pernicious argument is the idea that black failure and Asian success cannot
be explained by inequities and racism, and that they are one and the same; this allows
a segment of white America to avoid any responsibility for addressing racism or the
damage it continues to inflict.

“Sullivan’s comments showcase a classic and tenacious conservative strategy,” Janelle
Wong, the director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland, College
Park, said in an email. This strategy, she said, involves “1) ignoring the role that
selective recruitment of highly educated Asian immigrants has played in Asian
American success followed by 2) making a flawed comparison between Asian
Americans and other groups, particularly Black Americans, to argue that racism,
including more than two centuries of black enslavement, can be overcome by hard
work and strong family values.”

“It’s like the Energizer Bunny,” said Ellen D. Wu, an Asian-American studies professor
at Indiana University and the author of The Color of Success. Much of Wu’s work
focuses on dispelling the “model minority” myth, and she’s been tasked repeatedly
with publicly refuting arguments like Sullivan’s, which, she said, are incessant. “The
thing about the Sullivan piece is that it’s such an old-fashioned rendering. It’s very
retro in the kinds of points he made.”

http://aapidata.com/stats/national/national-poverty-aa-aj/

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/12/the_real_reasons_the_us_became.html

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0123-wu-chua-model-minority-chinese-20140123-story.html

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Since the end of World War II, many white people have used Asian-Americans and
their perceived collective success as a racial wedge. The effect? Minimizing the role
racism plays in the persistent struggles of other racial/ethnic minority groups —
especially black Americans.

On Twitter, people took Sullivan’s “old-fashioned rendering” to task.

Ida Bae Wells
@nhannahjones

Andrew Sullivan may want to start by studying immigration
policy to see just *which* Asians are allowed into this country in
the 1 place.

730 2:51 PM – Apr 15, 2017

161 people are talking about this

Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones · Apr 15, 2017
Replying to @nhannahjones @NYMag
But this is exactly why few people are actually qualified to write
*well* and *smartly* on race. They haven’t studied it, they sound
dumb.

Jeff Guo

Jeff Guo @_jeffguo · Apr 15, 2017
Replying to @_jeffguo
3. I won’t get into them all, but read this interview with historian
@ellendwu: washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2…

The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asi…
How Asians went from hated minority to useful prop
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3. I won't get into them all, but read this interview with historian @ellendwu: https://t.co/5IPT3bCArF

— Jeff Guo (@_jeffguo) April 15, 2017

2. First, there were a lot of incentives for the white mainstream to champion and promote stories of Asian American success after WWII

— Jeff Guo (@_jeffguo) April 15, 2017

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1/16/2019 ‘Model Minority’ Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks : Code Switch : NPR

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks 4/13

@ jeffguo
4. Importantly: Elevating Asian Americans as “deserving” and
“hardworking” was a tactic to denigrate African Americans

2,990 10:56 AM – Apr 15, 2017

1,193 people are talking about this

“During World War II, the media created the idea that the Japanese were rising up out
of the ashes [after being held in incarceration camps] and proving that they had the
right cultural stuff,” said Claire Jean Kim, a professor at the University of California,
Irvine. “And it was immediately a reflection on black people: Now why weren’t black
people making it, but Asians were?”

These arguments falsely conflate anti-Asian racism with anti-black racism, according
to Kim. “Racism that Asian-Americans have experienced is not what black people have
experienced,” Kim said. “Sullivan is right that Asians have faced various forms of
discrimination, but never the systematic dehumanization that black people have faced
during slavery and continue to face today.” Asians have been barred from entering the
U.S. and gaining citizenship and have been sent to incarceration camps, Kim pointed
out, but all that is different than the segregation, police brutality and discrimination
that African-Americans have endured.

Many scholars have argued that some Asians only started to “make it” when the
discrimination against them lessened — and only when it was politically convenient.
Amid worries that the Chinese exclusion laws from the late 1800s would hurt an
allyship with China in the war against imperial Japan, the Magnuson Act was signed in
1943, allowing 105 Chinese immigrants into the U.S. each year. As Wu wrote in 2014
in the Los Angeles Times, the Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion
“strategically recast Chinese in its promotional materials as ‘law-abiding, peace-loving,
courteous people living quietly among us'” instead of the “‘yellow peril’ coolie hordes.”
In 1965, the National Immigration Act replaced the national-origins quota system with
one that gave preference to immigrants with U.S. family relationships and certain
skills.

In 1966, William Petersen, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley,
helped popularize comparisons between Japanese-Americans and African-Americans.

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4. Importantly: Elevating Asian Americans as "deserving" and "hardworking" was a tactic to denigrate African Americans

— Jeff Guo (@_jeffguo) April 15, 2017

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175256

4. Importantly: Elevating Asian Americans as "deserving" and "hardworking" was a tactic to denigrate African Americans

— Jeff Guo (@_jeffguo) April 15, 2017

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0123-wu-chua-model-minority-chinese-20140123-story.html

1/16/2019 ‘Model Minority’ Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks : Code Switch : NPR

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks 5/13

His New York Times story, headlined, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” is
regarded as one of the most influential pieces written about Asian-Americans. It
solidified a prevailing stereotype of Asians as industrious and rule-abiding that would
stand in direct contrast to African-Americans, who were still struggling against
bigotry, poverty and a history rooted in slavery. In the opening paragraphs, Petersen
quickly puts African-Americans and Japanese-Americans at odds:

“Asked which of the country’s ethnic minorities has been subjected to the most
discrimination and the worst injustices, very few persons would even think of
answering: ‘The Japanese Americans,’ … Yet, if the question refers to persons alive
today, that may well be the correct reply. Like the Negroes, the Japanese have been the
object of color prejudice …. When new opportunities, even equal opportunities, are
opened up, the minority’s reaction to them is likely to be negative — either self-
defeating apathy or a hatred so all-consuming as to be self-destructive. For the well-
meaning programs and countless scholarly studies now focused on the Negro, we
barely know how to repair the damage that the slave traders started. The history of
Japanese Americans, however, challenges every such generalization about ethnic
minorities.”

But as history shows, Asian-Americans were afforded better jobs not simply because of
educational attainment, but in part because they were treated better.

“More education will help close racial wage gaps somewhat, but it will not resolve
problems of denied opportunity,” reporter Jeff Guo wrote last fall in the W ashington
Post. “Asian Americans — some of them at least — have made tremendous progress in
the United States. But the greatest thing that ever happened to them wasn’t that they
studied hard, or that they benefited from tiger moms or Confucian values. It’s that
other Americans started treating them with a little more respect.”

At the heart of arguments of racial advancement is the concept of “racial resentment,”
which is different than “racism,” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie recently wrote in his analysis of
the Sullivan article. “Racial resentment” refers to a “moral feeling that blacks violate
such traditional American values as individualism and self reliance,” as defined by
political scientists Donald Kinder and David Sears.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/19/the-real-secret-to-asian-american-success-was-not-education/?utm_term=.7037e43c01c1

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/04/andrew_sullivan_s_perpetuation_of_model_minority_and_black_pathology_myths.html

1/16/2019 ‘Model Minority’ Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks : Code Switch : NPR

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks 6/13

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And, Bouie points out, “racial resentment” is simply a tool that people use to absolve
themselves from dealing with the complexities of racism:

“In fact, racial resentment reflects a tension between the egalitarian self-image of most
white Americans and that anti-black affect. The ‘racist,’ after all, is a figure of stigma.
Few people want to be one, even as they’re inclined to believe the measurable
disadvantages blacks face are caused by something other than structural racism.
Framing blacks as deficient and pathological rather than inferior offers a path out for
those caught in that mental maze.”

Petersen’s, and now Sullivan’s, arguments have resurfaced regularly throughout the
last century. And they’ll likely keep resurfacing, as long as people keep seeking ways to
forgo responsibility for racism — and to escape that “mental maze.” As the writer
Frank Chin said of Asian-Americans in 1974: “Whites love us because we’re not black.”

Sometimes it’s instructive to look at past rebuttals to tired arguments — after all, they
hold up much better in the light of history.

model minority black people japanese americans asian american americans asian

asian americans u.s. african americans andrew sullivan racism

https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/U3n6

https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=1112190608&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory

https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy9yc3MvcG9kY2FzdC5waHA_aWQ9NTEwMzEy

https://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510312

http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~mma/teaching/MS80/readings/lee

https://www.npr.org/tags/523563775/model-minority

https://www.npr.org/tags/517702576/black-people

https://www.npr.org/tags/512904926/japanese-americans

https://www.npr.org/tags/489189393/asian-american

https://www.npr.org/tags/347079768/americans

https://www.npr.org/tags/217871229/asian

https://www.npr.org/tags/170745579/asian-americans

https://www.npr.org/tags/148995174/u-s

https://www.npr.org/tags/126944320/african-americans

https://www.npr.org/tags/126920003/andrew-sullivan

https://www.npr.org/tags/125999261/racism

1/16/2019 ‘Model Minority’ Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks : Code Switch : NPR

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks 7/13

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